I was very pleased to read about the acquisition of Aardvark by Google.  I’m a huge fan of the service and the team at Aardvark.  A part of me wishes that they had stayed independent and swung for the fences, but I also think that this is a great outcome and the team can make a lot of great things happen as part of Google.

The acquisition made me think about what I love about Aardvark.  I started out writing a post with a list of attributes, but I realized that I only really have one point to make:

The Magic of Aardvark is that it changed my online behavior.

Aardvark is a pretty unique service, but there are others out there that try to do “human powered search”.  But what blows me away about Aardvark is that it drives users to do something unique.  I’m not the kind of guy who goes to Yahoo answers, but for some reason, when Aardvark asks me a question, 80% of the time I’ll at least think about whether I’m able to provide a good answer, and often, I will respond.  If you look at Aardvark’s user metrics, they show that I am not alone. Power users to drive most of the answers on Aardvark, but unlike sites like Yelp or Tripadvisor, it’s not 1% creating 99% of the content.  It’s much more balanced, which I think yields much more balanced results.

There are a lot of startups out there that have a unique feature or two… at least until they are copied.  But once in a while, startups emerge that get you to say “wow, I can’t believe that people are actually doing x, y, or z”.  Those companies usually end up being worth a lot.  Recent ones that have come on the scene are Mint (“I can’t believe people are giving their banking passwords to a startup”), Foursquare (“I can’t believe that people actually check in to places”), and Blippy (“I can’t believe people are publishing their puchases”).

Now, I’m not advocating that companies try to make users do something unnatural to them.   But what these startups all do is remove the barriers to inherently natural behavior.  I already like to help out friends or friends of friends who need advice, and Aardvark allows me to do that in a natural way.